I initiated the mailing-list fuzzy-mail@dbai.tuwien.ac.at on December 1,
1992 to provide a discussion and announcement forum for everyone
interested in fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. Later, fuzzy-mail was
bidirectionally gatewayed to the newsgroups comp.ai.fuzzy, to the
mailing-list of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society
nafips-l@listproc.gsu.edu, as well as to the Asian fuzzy mailing-list
afuzzy@hrt.dis.titech.ac.jp (was: afuzzy@eos.amcac.ac.jp), and
unidirectionally via afuzzy to Lotfi Zadeh's bisc-group@eecs.berkeley.edu
announcement mailing-list. Fuzzy-mail also serves as a traditional
mailing-list to currently more than 1100 direct subscribers. All postings
propagated through fuzzy-mail are, after being automatically filtered
against spam, moderated by a group of volunteers, mainly in order to
filter out more spam or other inappropriate messages, but also to answer
regular FAQ questions, mediate the ad hominem attacks, weed out some
barely relevant conference announcements, etc. Despite the tremendous help
from the moderators, the amount of maintenance work necessary to host
fuzzy-mail has become very high, and so I have decided to reorganize the
mailing-list, as follows:

Other, alternative, ways to read and post to comp.ai.fuzzy are available
through all major browsers and some email-software (e.g., outlook express
or pine). They have the option to read internet news articles from an NNTP
server that is open to their IP address. Most university computer centers
and large ISPs carry newsgroups as a service to their community, and a few
are open to the whole world. Details for most browsers can be found on
http://news.cis.dfn.de/en/config.html

I will continue to host the mentioned gateways until other ways to
achieve the same result become available. As for web archives, the
current archives (http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/marchives/) will remain
accessible for as long as I can influence it, and hopefully longer,
since they represent historical data.

Moderation of the gatewayed messages will be discontinued. Advantage
is that no delay from moderation will occur further on. Also note that
the spam level on comp.ai.fuzzy is relatively low since anti-spam
measures are taken by most news servers. Of course this is a never
ending fight and no automatic spam filter can be perfect.

For those direct subscribers who would like to get all messages
delivered into their mail-box as up-to-now, I would like to ask them
to subscribe to either the nafips-l, the afuzzy, or the bisc-group
mailing list. Note, however, that no automatic spam filtering
mechanism will be in place as far as I know with these direct
mailing-list subscriptions. Subscription can be achieved as follows:

NAFIPS-L: To subscribe to this mailing list, use your system's email
software to send the following command to listproc@listproc.gsu.edu:
SUBSCRIBE NAFIPS-L first_name last_name
The SUBSCRIBE command must be entered in the
body of the mail, not on the "Subject:" line.

AFUZZY: To subscribe to this mailing list, use your system's email
software to send an empty message to
afuzzy-subscribe@hrt.dis.titech.ac.jp.

BISC-GROUP: To subscribe to this mailing list, use your system's email
software to send the following command to Majordomo@EECS.Berkeley.EDU
SUBSCRIBE BISC-GROUP
The SUBSCRIBE command must be entered in the
body of the mail, not on the "Subject:" line.

I hope that this reorganization will go smoothly and will ultimately lead
to improved service for all of us.